


Boystown

by skivvysupreme



Category: Glee
Genre: Clubbing, Drinking, M/M, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 13:52:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4524429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skivvysupreme/pseuds/skivvysupreme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt and Blaine have a night out in one of Chicago's most famous neighborhoods. Stop #7 of the Klaine Road Trip 2015!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boystown

There’s something odd about being tourists from a huge city, _in_ a huge city.

Kurt and Blaine do the tourist things, of course, over their two-day visit in Chicago. The city's got no shortage of recognizable landmarks. It helps that Mike Chang, still living in the city and dancing with the Joffrey Ballet, has already emailed Blaine an annotated list of must-sees.

They take ridiculous, distorted selfies in the giant, silver funhouse mirror that is The Bean. [**_(“I know Google Maps will probably call it ‘Cloud Gate’ but nobody calls it that. Bean, not Cloud Gate. Sears Tower, not Willis Tower. And so forth,” Mike says.)_ **](http://cpplunkett.photos/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/the-bean-cloud-gate-chicago-spring-050314-16x9-watermark.jpg)They take the architecture tour, a boat ride on the Chicago River that weaves through the center of downtown and around the harbor of Lake Michigan. [**_(“There’s no better way to see the skyline!”)_**](http://vertexeng.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Chicago-Illinois.jpg) They eat dinner at the Signature Room, the luxe restaurant at the top of John Hancock Center, and watch the sun set behind the other skyscrapers. **_([“I know everyone wants to go to the Sears Tower, but the Hancock’s got the better view, I promise!”) ](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/0d/ea/11/0dea11ae803744cf5cb6d23804da9514.jpg)_** They ride the 150-foot tall Ferris Wheel on Navy Pier, but they wait until nightfall, per Mike’s instructions. [**_(“You won’t believe what the lit-up lakefront looks like at night, especially with the black water underneath you. Trust me.”)_**](http://freelargephotos.com/002378_s.jpg) They walk up North Michigan Avenue, also known as “the Magnificent Mile,” and its designer-laden side streets. [**_(“DON’T LET KURT INTO PRADA. DON’T LET HIM LET YOU INTO RALPH LAUREN. NOBODY’S ALLOWED IN MARC JACOBS. BE STRONG, MY FRIEND.”)_**](https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2850/11094646516_75109146d6_b.jpg)

That being said, what strikes Kurt and Blaine about the city is how comfortable they feel in it, as city transplants themselves. They know how to keep moving down a busy city street with minimal hesitation. They know how to navigate the simply arranged and color-coded subway. Now, steadied by the Chicago-style deep-dish pizza they had for lunch with Mike [**_(“Giordano’s is the most famous, but Lou Malnati’s is better!”)_**](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/02/19/article-2562569-1B9F001900000578-740_634x375.jpg) they’re ready to check out the last of Mike’s recommendations: the gay bars of Boystown.

“The Kit Kat Lounge?” Kurt tilts his head skeptically at the sign above the door.

“It was on Mike’s list! He said he comes to this neighborhood all the time with his dancer friends, so these are tried and tested hotspots,” Blaine says, grinning widely and looking like a sunflower in his tight, golden yellow polo. “Apparently, Kit Kat has really great cocktails, so we could start here, get warmed up, and make our way south, down… Halsted Street, is that what street we’re on?”

Kurt nods, glancing at the tall, bronze pillar banded with a rainbow around the center and “NORTHALSTED” underneath it. The metal pillars line the street, positioned every fifty paces to declare the neighborhood Boystown and mark its myriad of LGBT+ owned and supported businesses.

He has to admit, the Kit Kat Lounge is cute. He can see an old black-and-white movie projected on the walls inside, even as neon lights bounce and swirl around the space, lighting up the cushy white sofas and white tabletops that line the main area of the lounge.

Blaine squeezes his hand. “Want to sit outside? It’s a nice night and I can tell it’s kind of loud in there.”

“Good choice. We can save the loud clubs for later.”

Blaine leads them to a free table on the patio, where strings of fairy lights and fake ivy leaves criss-cross the wood beams overhead. He immediately picks up the thick booklet that makes up the cocktail menu. His eyes widen in excitement behind the book, the lights bouncing off his hair and setting his summer tan aglow. “Mmm, I think it’s a vodka night. Something really fun. How does a—oh, oh my god, we have to order these!”

“Order what, the whole menu?” Kurt teases, brushing his foot against Blaine’s ankle. “Honey, let’s pace ourselves tonight. I don’t want to have to carry you back to the hotel.”

Blaine just sticks his tongue out at him and keeps reading the menu.

“Hello, hello, welcome to Kit Kat, my name’s Johnny and I’ll be your server on this beautiful night out, can I get you sweethearts started with a couple drinks?” The waiter, in head-to-toe black and tortoiseshell glasses, appears at the side of the table and says all of this very quickly as he cocks a hip towards Blaine and playfully leans over to look at the cocktail menu.

Blaine lifts his gaze to Kurt over the book and asks, “Can I surprise you?”

Kurt rolls his eyes good-naturedly and waits for Blaine to make their order.

“I’m surprising him, shhh,” Blaine says to their waiter as he winks at Kurt, holding up the book for Johnny so that Kurt can’t see what he’s chosen. “Can I get this for my husband, please? And… one of these for me?”

Johnny grins and says, “Sure thing, honey. I’ll be back with your drinks in a bit.”

Kurt leans back in his seat and sighs, watching all the other people on the patio and glancing down the street at one of the rainbow flags hanging from the shop across the street.

“You’re kind of in a quiet mood tonight,” Blaine observes, tilting his head at Kurt and wiggling his hand a little. “Did you not want to go out? We can head back to the hotel after our drinks and have a night in, if you want.”

Kurt shakes his head and rubs his thumb across the back of Blaine’s hand. “No, I really want to go dancing. I was just thinking. I can’t even imagine, growing up with this. If you’re a gay kid who lives anywhere near this neighborhood, it’s just… I don’t know that I would have fought so hard to get to New York.”

“Are you saying you want to move to Chicago?”

“Of course not, I love New York, it’s home now. It’s just that I used to have the same thoughts about it, you know? About what growing up in a big, mostly liberal city would have been like. Instead of Lima. Especially considering we’re not even far from Ohio right now.”

Blaine puts his chin on his free hand. “You know, I remember every detail of the first real conversation we ever had. I remember Wes and David telling you about Dalton’s zero-tolerance bullying policy, how everyone was treated the same. And I remember the look on your face, the way you sort of… collapsed into yourself. Like the news was devastating. Like you hadn’t even known that was an option.”

“I hadn’t,” Kurt sighs, with a sad little smile. “But it gets better.”

“It does, for some of us,” Blaine murmurs, lifting Kurt’s hand to kiss his wedding ring. “But, crazy as it might sound… everything that happened in Ohio brought us both to Dalton and to each other, so, even if we shouldn’t have had a reason to be there, I’m glad we did. It would have taken longer to meet you if we hadn’t.”

Kurt leans across the table and kisses him.

“All right! For Cutie #1,” the waiter says, returning to the table with two bright blue cocktails and setting one in front of Blaine, “I have an I Blue Your Mind.”

Blaine laughs and grins toothily down at his drink, a simple, deep blue martini.

“And, for Drop Dead Gorgeous over here—“

Kurt hums, pleased and preening as he sits back in his chair.

“—I have a Lady Gaga.”

The drink Johnny sets in front of Kurt is a lighter, brighter shade of blue than Blaine’s and garnished with a chunk of rock candy and a small blue glowstick. Kurt barks out a laugh, a loud, hearty, belly laugh, and pulls the drink closer. “Seriously, Blaine?”

“It comes with a disco stick, Kurt!” Blaine exclaims, utterly beside himself as he reaches across the table to tap the end of the glowstick with one finger. Then he gyrates a little in place and sings, _“Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick…”_

The waiter laughs and starts to walk away from their table. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Holler if you need anything!”

They raise their glasses to each other and clink them together gently before taking their first sips.

Blaine’s eyes widen behind his glass. “It’s like drinking Skittles, holy crap—“

The Lady Gaga is sweet, too, but Kurt can definitely taste the alcohol. Kurt swirls the rock candy around in his drink and sticks it in his mouth, sucking on the crystallized sugar coated in the sweet, potent blue cocktail. Blaine pauses to watch, his drink hovering in front of his mouth as his eyes stay glued to Kurt’s lips around the candy.

Kurt watches Blaine watching him, watches Blaine’s eyes slowly going darker under the fairy lights, and licks some of the excess off his mouth. "Oh, yeah. I'll definitely be ready to dance after this."

*****

Roscoe’s is… a lot.

The club, at the corner of Halsted and Roscoe, is clearly the place to be. It’s the only place Kurt and Blaine have encountered so far with a line to get in, though it’s a short one that moves quickly, and they get inside without too much of a wait. The interior is massive, the main room consisting of a huge, square bar manned by three bartenders with a smattering of high tables and bar stools around it. Past that, there’s a much smaller room with a little bar—where Blaine grabs them a pair of generously proportioned vodka-cranberry cocktails so as not to mix liquors--that leads to bathrooms on one side and an outdoor smokers’ patio on the other. And past that, the crowded dance floor—dance _room_ , really—is lit up in bright blue and green swirls of light and color. Random strobe effects go off here and there to accentuate the bass drop of whatever electronic remix of a dance remix of a Top 40 hit is playing right now.

They dance for a while, tightly wrapped around each other and grinding together since there’s little room for anything else. Kurt’s feeling the second drink, pleasantly buzzed even as he’s getting sweaty with all the dancing bodies crowding the space, but as he leans in to kiss Blaine, Blaine suddenly jerks sideways and yells, “What the hell?!”

“Blaine? What happened?” Kurt screams over the music.

Blaine squirms uncomfortably, reaching behind himself to feel the back of his shirt. “Someone spilled their drink on me!”

Kurt spends most of his time waiting for Blaine outside the bathroom fending off a drunk, pushy, muscular redhead with a buzzcut and a beard. The guy corners Kurt against the wall and refuses to leave his space, despite Kurt’s increasingly obvious irritation, until Kurt finally shoves the guy away from him, lifts his left hand in the guy’s face, and yells, “Screw off! You don’t understand the word ‘no,’ so maybe you need a visual aid!”

Blaine returns, shirt dry and mostly stainless, just as the guy rolls his eyes at Kurt’s ring and wanders away. “Are you okay?”

“What’s next on Mike’s list?”

Blaine grabs Kurt’s hand without another word and leads them out of the club.

*****

Scarlet is small. Very small.

"It didn’t look like there were this many people in here from the outside," Kurt says in Blaine’s ear as they squeeze through the entrance. The throng of moving bodies isn’t so snug once they’re in, but it’s not a large dance floor and people aren’t dancing as closely as they were at Roscoe’s. As expected, most people seem to be clustered around the bar to their right.

“It looks less crazy farther back though!” Blaine answers, crowding up behind Kurt and clutching his hand tightly so Kurt can use his slight height advantage to slip them both through the crowd.

A tall, thin blond in a faded orange tank top and a flower-patterned snapback waves at them when they reach the middle of the bar. “Hey guys, checking your pants?”

“Are we—what?”

“That's the special tonight! Check your pants,” he says, gesturing to the wall of half-full cubbies behind him and flashing his bright white teeth like a game show model, “and get a free drink!”

Kurt and Blaine both glance down at the same time. The blond is indeed pants-less, clad only in bright blue briefs and a pair of Toms.

“I’ll do it if you do it,” Blaine says, grinning at Kurt. He presses close and slips his fingers down to where their waists meet, toys with the button on his own pants. Kurt can feel his fingers moving against him, teasing Kurt a little through his pants since Blaine’s waist sits a couple inches below his. “When in Rome...”

“...start stripping?” Kurt finishes.

Blaine nips at his jaw and shrugs, still toying with his waistband and waiting for Kurt’s answer.

This club is so warm—and dare he think it, _intimate_. The DJ is actually playing songs with lyrics. The lights are dim and there are so many people who have dropped trou or skirt already that no one’s paying attention to who is or isn’t half-naked. Kurt feels good, he feels safe here, and his husband is so carefree right now that it’s contagious.

He reaches down, squeezes Blaine’s fingers, and starts to unbutton his own pants. Once they’re both down to their boxer briefs—black for Kurt, bright red for Blaine—Kurt folds and stacks both pairs of pants neatly and hands them to the cubby attendant. “What’s your name?”

“Ethan!”

“Ethan, if anything happens to these...”

“You’re good, I swear on my job! Here, these are my pants, I’ll put mine on top, they’re not going anywhere!” He reaches for the highest cubby on the right hand side, one that requires leggy Ethan to use a step-stool to reach, and slides their pants under a pair of white jeans. Then he hands them both tickets and says, “Have fun tonight, guys!”

Once they’ve downed their free drinks (Kurt’s choice this time, bright and refreshing lemon drops to stick with the night’s vodka theme) and found a comfortable spot on the dance floor, they pull each other close. Scarlet’s DJ is their favorite so far, switching from Ace of Base to, yes, Lady Gaga, then to En Vogue and Timbaland and Kesha and tons of other music they both recognize and can sing along with. And they do, loudly and ecstatically alongside the other dancing people around them.

The energy inside this bar is so… happy. The crowd’s not pushy. The music actually makes them want to dance. And the fact that a fourth of the patrons are nonchalantly running around with their pants off lends a certain loose, carefree attitude to the place.

Kurt and Blaine each have another lemon drop.

“Kurt, I’m already—we shouldn’t—gonna get hard if you keep doing that,” Blaine pants against Kurt’s mouth. They’ve been making out in their area of the dance floor for about ten minutes, Kurt having gotten increasingly more tactile as time passes and the alcohol settles in.

“So get hard,” Kurt replies, swiveling his hips and pressing against Blaine where they’re both hot and starting to thicken in their underwear. The lost layer of clothing is making one hell of a difference, and Kurt feels sensitive and tingly everywhere. Plus, if he’s honest… he’s getting a bit of a thrill from being with Blaine like this in public.

“We’re in our underwear, Kurt. We can’t.”

He drops his chin to Blaine’s shoulder and sighs. As much as he wants to press Blaine into the wall and grind with him until they both lose it, because they’re in Chicago, in Boystown, and other couples around them are already doing it, and they can… he knows Blaine has a point. “Not here?”

“Not here.”

Kurt sways a little into Blaine’s body, unintentionally rubbing against him again.

“Whoa, you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. You just feel really good. And I’m hungry. Can we get food now, if we can’t have sex?”

“Of course. Mike gave us a ‘drunk food’ stop, too. Some place called Cheesie’s.”

“That sounds delicious. Oh my god, Blaine, what if they have cheesecake?”

“We’ll see, baby. We’ll see. Let’s go get our pants back first.”

*****

Cheesie’s, conveniently located a few doors away from the subway, turns out to be a pub with bright orange walls that specializes in grilled cheese sandwiches on thick, buttery toast. Blaine orders “the Tenderizer,” with bacon and barbecue fried chicken in the middle and a side of ranch, and Kurt gets “the Mac,” stuffed with macaroni and cheese and a little tub of tomato soup for dipping sauce. Though Blaine declares himself done with drinking for the night, Kurt insists on another, so Blaine orders Mike’s shot recommendation for him: a secret menu concoction called a “Pancake Breakfast.” It’s a shot of rum and some mystery liquor that tastes, miraculously, like maple syrup on pancakes, followed by an orange juice chaser.

By the time they’ve finished each delicious, ingenious creation, Kurt’s giggling into Blaine’s shoulder, inconsolably amused by the reimagined painting of Michelangelo’s _Creation of Adam_ that hangs on the opposite wall, in which God is handing Adam a grilled cheese sandwich.

“I think it’s time to go back to the hotel,” Kurt manages to say once he’s stopped laughing. “I’m… drunker than I meant to be. Why aren’t you drunker, too?”

“Because I ate more at lunch than you did and you've had an extra drink.” Blaine hops off his barstool and holds an arm out for Kurt. “Come on, subway’s almost next door. We can take the red line all the way back to our hotel.”

Ten minutes later, Kurt’s settled against Blaine’s side in a noisy subway car, red-cheeked and warm and full of food and buzzing all over. Blaine has an arm around Kurt’s shoulders and his fingers gently massaging Kurt’s scalp, lulling Kurt even further into blissful sleepiness than he already is.

"Shouldn't’ve had that last drink. But it tasted like the breakfasts you make for me,” Kurt says, nuzzling the tip of his nose against Blaine’s cheek. “And it was four dollars! Like, it was on sale, B! And there was macaroni in my sandwich. Oh my god. I love Chicago. I love it. Oh my god. I didn’t—" Kurt hiccups. “You know I don’t usually—I didn’t mean to get this drunk, I’m sorry.”

Blaine guides Kurt’s head onto his shoulder, trying not to smile too much at what an adorable, snuggly drunk his husband is. "It’s okay, I’ve got you, baby. And I'll drive tomorrow. You can nap and recharge on the ride to St. Louis."

"Mm-hmm. Best husband ever."

“Nah, just the luckiest,” Blaine murmurs, ducking down to kiss Kurt’s forehead.


End file.
